It was even less likely that the murderer had thought scaring Kumi would make it easier to kill Ueda. Kumi had reported seeing Golem a full thirty minutes after he had been murdered.
And then there was the sound of a man screaming. What was that? Golem was found in pieces in the snow near Room 10, so had he been taken to pieces after being used to frighten Kumi?
The detectives spent the whole morning on a sofa in the corner of the salon, looking utterly perplexed. Okuma lowered his voice so that the guests at the dinner table couldn’t hear.
“I’ve said it many times, but I’ve had enough of this bizarre case. I want to step down from the investigating team, get out of here as fast as I can. It feels like they’re taking the piss.”
Ushikoshi dropped his voice too.
“Same here. Some kind of madman killed Ueda, then hoisted up a doll to terrify the living daylights out of Kumi Aikura, then pulled it apart and tossed it in the snow. I don’t want anything to do with the kind of psycho who would do something like that.”
“Kumi Aikura’s room, number 1, is right above Room 3, the room where the doll was kept,” Sergeant Ozaki pointed out.
“True, but there’s no window below hers on that side. The south wall of the Tengu Room has no window.”
“The sequence of events that you gave just now, Chief Inspector, does it make any sense?”
“How could it? Personally, I’ve given up on making any sense out of it.”
“There is one way to bring together all of the unknown parts of this riddle and make something of it,” said Okuma.
“And what’s that?”
“It was the doll. It did everything—killed Ueda and Kikuoka too. And then that night after doing Ueda in, it flew up into the air and on a whim decided to peep in through Kumi’s window. But it got a bit carried away, and its body fell to bits, causing it to roar in pain.”
Okuma’s comment was met with complete silence. Although everyone knew it was inappropriate and childish, no one felt like telling him off. On the contrary, they felt that somewhere in the fairy tale there was a grain of truth.
Okuma, for his part, thought better of it, and decided to suggest a more reasonable theory.
“Let’s forget about the wild version for now and get back to the problem of Kikuoka’s locked room. The knife was stuck into his body, like this, right?”
“That’s right,” said Ozaki. “The knife entered from diagonally above, on a downward trajectory. So we can assume the killer held it high in the air and then brought it down with force on the victim like this. The knife entered his body at a slight diagonal angle.”
“We’re thinking the killer stood behind him and stabbed him?”
“Yes, that’s what I think. Alternatively, that the victim was bending forward slightly. That could have made it easier for the suspect to stab him.”
“What you’re saying, Ozaki, is that you think that it’s likely the victim wasn’t sleeping when he was stabbed, but that he was up and about in his room?”
“Well, I don’t have enough evidence to reach a conclusion about that, but yes, I think he was hunched over. If he’d been stabbed while sleeping, he would have to have been lying on his front. And besides, if he had been lying down, it would have been more likely the knife was stuck in at a lower angle.”
“If you’re standing over someone sleeping like that on their front, you might bring down the arm with the knife from straight above and then it would end up perpendicular to the body.”
“Well, I suppose so.”
“And if Kikuoka was awake and moving around, there’s something I don’t understand,” said Ushikoshi. “At around 10.30, or maybe more like 10.25, Kozaburo Hamamoto knocked on the door of Room 14. I know he did because I was right there with him. It was a relatively gentle knock, but there was no response from Kikuoka. If he’d still been awake he would have answered. His time of death was about thirty minutes after that, so he couldn’t already have been dead at that point. He must have been asleep.
“But then, if what you say is right, thirty minutes later the victim woke up again and let his murderer into the room. So how did the killer manage to wake Kikuoka? Was there any different way of waking him from the one that Kozaburo Hamamoto tried? All he could have done was to knock on the door. There’s really no other way. That night, Inspector Okuma was sleeping in the room above, and Haruo Kajiwara next door. The killer couldn’t have shouted or made any other kind of noise. So how did he manage to wake Kikuoka? Or perhaps Kikuoka was just pretending to be asleep when Hamamoto knocked.”
“Okay, then, so d’you still think the killer stuck a stick though that air vent?” said Okuma.
Perhaps it was the snide tone, but Ushikoshi pulled a face. He was fed up with all the puzzles.
“Hey, if Ozaki’s right with his theory that the victim was stabbed when he was standing upright, can’t we work out the suspect’s height from the angle of the knife?” said Okuma.
“That kind of thing is surprisingly difficult. It doesn’t work like it does in mystery novels. Like we said before, the victim might have been bending down. Still, it could be said that the knife is in a fairly high position. I think we could probably rule out a very short person. That’s about as much as we can say at this point. In which case, we can probably eliminate the women—except for Eiko who’s over 170 centimetres tall.”
“There goes the dwarf theory.”
“What the hell?” snapped Ushikoshi.
In an instant, the atmosphere between the guardians of the peace turned threatening.
“Well, anyway,” said Ozaki hurriedly, in an attempt to break the tension, “the bigger problem is that the knife was stuck in the right side of his back.”
“Because the heart isn’t on the right,” continued Ushikoshi. “Maybe the killer was in a hurry?”
“Maybe he didn’t feel like stabbing him in the heart,” said Okuma. “You never know with folks.”
“Actually, I was talking about whether he was right- or left-handed.”
But no matter how much Ozaki tried to revive the discussion, the other two had completely clammed up.
Abruptly, Ushikoshi got up from the sofa.
“I’ve had enough! I give up! I just don’t get it. There’ll probably be another crime committed by the time we finish talking about it. I’m going back to the station and I’m going to ask Tokyo for help. You okay with that? Any objections? At this point we’re just going to have to swallow our pride.”
Everyone fell silent as Ushikoshi briskly marched out of the salon.
“I s’pose it always was too much for us to handle alone, this confounded case,” said Okuma.
Ozaki was the only one who looked disappointed.
The three detectives hadn’t exactly been incompetent, but their years of experience were proving useless in solving this particular case.
Outside, not a single snowflake fluttered by the window. It was a gloomy, heavy morning. The rest of the residents of the mansion sat at a distance from the three police officers in the corner, holding their own private discussion. Sasaki muttered something.
“However you look at it, the detectives are the criminals here.”
It was the afternoon when Ushikoshi returned to the Ice Floe Mansion.
“How did it go? Ozaki asked.
“They were quite disapproving, to tell the truth.”
“What?”
“I mean they really want us to forget about saving face and agree to accept help in doing everything we can to solve this. Superintendent Nakamura, who I met when I was in Tokyo for the Yuzo Akawata case, is someone I can get along with. I explained our case in great detail and he agreed it was a very strange one, and if the killer really was one of the people here in the house, then there was no need to be in too much of a hurry.